


Stitched to the Earth

by Amazing_E_ko



Category: Gunnerkrigg Court
Genre: F/F, Gen, Mystery, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-08
Updated: 2015-12-08
Packaged: 2018-05-05 14:00:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5377823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amazing_E_ko/pseuds/Amazing_E_ko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A cat goes missing. When Reynard finds her kittens, he enlists Annie, Kat and Paz to help him reunite mother and children. But there are many strange places in the court, and some that do not want to be disturbed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stitched to the Earth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laurus_nobilis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurus_nobilis/gifts).



The streets and alleyways were choked with fog. It hung low around the eaves of the houses and tangled with the smoke of the chimneys. It coated the bushes and grass with beads of dew, it shed drops on windows and doors, it made the stones heavy and clammy to the touch. It muffled all sound. It rose up from the canals and the river, so that each step threatened to lead travellers into the watery depths.

Down the narrowest alleyways lay the oldest houses, which leaned so closely together that they shared one ivy plant. They were a tangled mess of style and form, no two exactly alike. One had gold-tiled mosaics above its door, which on a sunny day might turn to a blaze of light, while another was painted blue, its small square windows shuttered for so long that the hinges had rusted through completely. The wall below them was stained red from their weeping.

The oldest house of all, at the end of the narrowest street, was built in plain stone. The only decoration was the linked arches of the windows on the first floor, their facade built in ornamental red and yellow brick. Once, they might have been beautiful, even welcoming, but time and dust and rain had eaten them away, so that the red was black and the cream was brown and both were pitted with holes. The house itself had fared little better. Its wood was rotting and warped, the front door stable only because no-one had disturbed it in years. The garden was a tangle of long weeds and overgrown bushes. The buddleia in the southern corner had become a small tree, its thick, sweet-scented purple flowers pulled back down to the ground under their own weight. The iron railing that hemmed the garden in was bent and twisted and creaking, and the bridge that led from the gate across the narrow canal had fared little better.

The house could in any case hardly be seen through the thick fog. The edge of the bridge was hardly visible until stepped on, and then it was too late. That was how the cat ended up running onto the bridge, and into the grounds of the house. Distantly, she could still hear the barking of the dog that had driven her here, but only now, as she ran through the bars of the gate, did she realise how muffled that sound was. And as she entered the garden it faded away completely.

Silence lay thick among the grasses and weeds, drowning hearing the way the fog drowned sight. The cat paced through it warily. Unfamiliar ground was always dangerous, and here all her senses seemed dampened. Even smell was weak. The front step of the house loomed out of the gloom, heavy slabs of limestone leading up to the old wooden door, framed by white decorative columns. As she set her paw on the front step, she heard a long groaning sound. At first, it might only have been the wind, or some structure of the house resettling itself. The cat’s hair fluffed up all along her back anyway, and her ears twitched, trying to identify the source of the noise. There was nothing to guide her, only that long low sound, which grew louder and more terrible with every moment.

She began to retreat, step by step, back towards the bridge and away from the house. At first she moved slowly, but as the sound continued, she sped up until she was running. No food was worth this noise, and she had kittens to think of. She ran through the thick and tangled grass, looking for the gate. Something loomed out of the darkness, and she sped up, only to realise that it was the black shadow of the house. The door swung open at her approach, and the darkness of the hall swallowed her.

 

Renard found the kittens. They were in a bush near the graveyard, mewling piteously. Four of them, thin little things, their eyes still gummed up and their paws soft and pink. They lay curled in a heap, and Renard could tell that they were near death. He sniffed around, but the smell of the mother cat was faint, a least a day old. Whether she had abandoned them or been prevented from returning, he had no way of knowing, but it was clear that she was not coming back.

He quickly realised that he was in no position to move them. His toy form was too small to carry all four, and in his larger wolf form he had only his mouth, which was no better. This would require help. He left the kittens where they were and began to lope towards the year nine dormitories.

Annie and Kat were sitting together on the lower bunk when Reynard came in, talking quietly. Annie was lying on her back, her long hair spilling out like fire across the bedspread. Kat leaned back against the wall, her knees drawn up to her chest so that she could rest her chin on them. Kat’s face was pink, and Annie was covering her mouth and laughing. It was not an unfamiliar scene, but it still made something in Renard’s heart clench, a complicated knot of feelings about who Annie had been and who she was becoming that he had never been comfortable looking too directly at.

They both turned to look at him when the door opened.

‘I thought you’d be out later,’ Annie said, sitting up to look at him. Her expression shifted to one of concern. ‘Renard, what’s wrong?’

‘I found a litter of kittens abandoned about a mile from here,’ he said. ‘No recent signs of the mother, and I fear they are near death.’

Kat’s eyes widened, and she jumped up from the bed.

‘Oh no! Annie, you go get the kittens, and I’ll find Paz. She’ll know how to help them.’

Without waiting for a reply she ducked around Renard and out of the room.

Annie was looking at Renard, a faint softness in the tilt of her eyelids.

‘Shall we go?’

 

Annie brought a box with her, an old cardboard one she and Kat had used to move rooms. She had put an old pillowcase and a blanket in it, a cheap fluffy one that usually lay draped across the end of her bed.

Renard led her quickly away from the blocky towers of the school and towards the residential area. Annie rarely had cause to travel this far into the court, and would happily have stayed to look at the rows of old red-brick houses in their neat garden plots, but Renard hurried her on, his worry increasing as they came closer to the bramble patch where the kittens were hidden.

There were no new signs of the mother. Her scent was the same faded trail, leading away to the west. The kittens were shivering piteously, and Annie pressed a hand to her mouth as she saw them. Their tiny bodies, one black and white, the others mottled grey, were pressed close together, and they cried out as Renard lifted them one by one into the box.

Annie stared down at them, and then carefully brushed the head of the black and white kitten with a fingertip.

‘What do you think happened to their mother?’ she said, her voice as dry and flat as always. If Renard hadn’t known her as well as he did he would not have recognised the emotion simmering in her voice. He leaned over and nudged her hand with his nose.

‘Let us take the kittens to Paz, and then you and I will go and find their mother,’ he said.

 

Paz’s workshop was cool and dry, its constant temperature maintained by the thrum of distant air conditioners. The long tables were white and gleaming, and there were various medical instruments ranged around the walls for easy access. Annie looked around curiously as she entered, using both her eyes and her etheric senses, but neither gave her a context to understand what she was seeing.

Much easier to understand were Paz and Kat, standing together in the middle of the room, talking quietly. They were not touching, but their bodies leaned in to each other, the centimetres between them buzzing with tension. They both looked to the door as Annie and Renard came in, and that simmering energy dissipated with Paz’ quick movement towards them. She took the box from Annie and set it down on the nearest table. A bottle of milk, with a tiny plastic teat, was ready and waiting. Paz tested the milk on the back of her hand and then picked a kitten up out of the box and began feeding it.

‘How are they?’ Kat said, looking anxious.

‘Mmm… They’re in bad condition. I don’t know of any cats who could foster them right now, but I’ll ask around.’ Paz turned her gaze to Annie and Renard.

‘Was there any sign of the mother?’

‘I could smell her,’ Renard said, ‘but she had not returned in at least a day.’

Paz sighed, and her face was troubled.

‘Without their mother, there is only so much I can do for these kittens. Our best chance of saving them is to find her.’

‘There’s every chance she’s dead or injured,’ Annie said, her face grim. ‘The court is a dangerous place.’

Kat shook her head.

‘We have to try and find her. We can’t just leave the kittens to die.’

‘I agree,’ Renard said. ‘Antimony and I will follow the trail.’

‘You’re not leaving me behind,’ Kat said.

‘Or me.’

They all turned to look at Paz. She rarely joined their group, and they had all assumed she would want to stay and care for the kittens.

‘Once I’ve fed the kittens they’ll be fine to sleep for a few hours. There won’t be much I can do for them. And don’t forget, I’m the only one who can talk to their mother. She might not agree to follow you back otherwise.’

Annie nodded.

‘That makes sense. Finish feeding the kittens and we’ll go.’

 

The trail, Renard insisted, was easy enough to follow, though he moved much more slowly than usual, sometimes retreading the same ground several times in an effort to ensure he was following the right scent. Luckily for them, there had been no rain for almost a week, and so the scent had lingered.

It led them on a roundabout route, down blind alleys and over walls, through neat gardens and strange wastelands, until at last they came to a long road stretching out into into a lake. The water, deep and dark under the flat grey clouds, lapped softly against the stones. Annie squinted, but could find no sign of the opposite shore.

‘Is this the same lake the power station lies in?’

‘Maybe.’ Kat grinned. ‘How many huge lakes can there be in the Court?’

Annie looked back towards the road. It was straight and well maintained, but about five hundred metres from the shore it abruptly vanished into a heavy bank of fog.

‘I don’t like the look of that.’

‘No more do I,’ Renard said, the hackles on his back rising. ‘But this is where the trail leads.’

They shared a glance, all four of them. But there was nothing else they could do. Staying close together, they walked along the road and into the depths of the fog.

 

Slowly the houses appeared to them, dark shapes that tentatively solidified the closer they came. The road had opened into a small square, cobbled in large, flat stones that were slippery with the damp. In the centre was a fountain, with a  bronze statue of a mermaid in the centre, water pouring from a vase she held cupped on her shoulder.

‘What a strange place,’ Kat said. ‘I’ve never seen anywhere else in the Court like it.’

‘It reminds me of Venetzia,’ Paz said thoughtfully. ‘I went there once with my parents.’

‘The trail ends here,’ Renard let out a frustrated whuff. ‘The fog has dispersed it. Now we will have to search ourselves.’

Annie was silent, her eyes wide open and her body still. Little droplets of fog beaded on her lips and eyelashes. The others watched her carefully, knowing that she was in the ether. When at last she came back to her body and shook herself off with a quick shiver, there was a worried look in her eyes.

‘There’s some kind of power here,’ she said, her face troubled. ‘I don’t understand it, but I can feel it. I think maybe the cat got caught up in it.’

‘Can you take us there?’ Paz asked. If she was scared, she didn’t show it.

‘I think so.’

Annie led them north, through a narrow gap between two houses. They had to walk single-file down the alley, the walls leaning in above them, kept apart by narrow brick arches. The alley turned corners several times, squeezing its way between the old buildings with their stone walls and flaking plaster. Always around them was the faint sound of lapping water.

The silence was endless. Sometimes there would be a faint clatter of dishes from behind a shuttered window, or snatches of music drifting down from higher floors, and once Annie heard a dog barking, off in the distance. But these sounds seemed only to intensify the silence, rather than disrupting it.

Several times they found themselves walking down dead ends, that led only to a dark doorway or a canal with a jetty. If these streets had a plan, it was no plan Annie could understand. She relied mostly on her etheric senses to guide them, heading for the source of power she could feel.

The further the went into the maze of streets, the more abandoned the houses looked. Their shutters hung loose of were rusted shut. The plaster had come away from their walls in huge chunks. Their doors were cracked, old wood showing through the layers of paint. There were black stains where the floods had risen which had never been cleaned. It leant the area a feeling of deep abandonment, like the painting of an old master left outside in the rain for too long.

Kat and Paz were holding hands, their grip too tight to be truly tender. Annie stood close to Renard, but did not touch him. She could feel fear clutching at her, looking for a way into her heart, and that made her furious. She was the fire-head girl, a powerful elemental in her own right. She had faced down a moss ogre. Fear had no place here.

Perhaps it was this that made her more rash than usual. If she had been paying close attention she would have noticed the tenor of the etheric power. She might have realised how tangled her own feelings were with it, and thought better of her plan. But Annie’s pride in remaining calm and rational undid her, and to prove her confidence she pushed herself forward, across the old iron bridge and into the garden of the last house.

‘It feels colder here,’ Kat said, shivering and rubbing her arms.

‘Everywhere in England is cold,’ Paz said, a little dryly, but she was shivering too.

Renard raised his head, sniffing the air.

‘It smells like something died here,’ he said, the hackles on his back standing up.

Annie closed her eyes, reaching out into the ether. At once she was struck by the light, a bone white glow that surrounded the house and garden. In the ether the fog was non-existant. She could see every detail of the old house - including the woman who stood on the first floor, looking out one of the huge windows.

‘There’s someone there!’ she said, coming back to her body. ‘I saw them on the first floor.’

Kat squinted.

‘I can’t see anyone,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Maybe it’s the fog?’

‘She’s probably an etheric being,’ Renard said grimly. ‘My reach does not stretch as far as Antimony’s, not in this body, but I can feel the etheric power that saturates this place.’

‘Whatever she is, we’ll deal with her,’ Annie said, cool and calm. ‘Let’s go in.’

Paz was silent, watching them. She could feel a little of what Annie and Renard were talking about, just a shiver of a presence that made the hair on her arms stand up. It coated the back of her throat with a feeling she knew she remembered but couldn’t place. As she followed the others through the front door, which opened with a gentle push, she thought she heard something, a low, weeping scream that echoed around her for a moment and then vanished.

The hall they had entered was long and narrow, with doorways opening off to either side. At the end a set of narrow stone steps climbed up to the second floor. The walls were panelled in dark wood, with a wallpaper above that was almost painfully pretty, its delicate pattern of roses not nearly enough to lighten the heavy air of the dark space. There was a thick smell of damp and must, and Kat pulled her sleeve over her mouth with a face of disgust.

They walked down the hallway slowly, looking into the rooms they passed. Two were sitting rooms, one with bright pale colours on the walls and couches, the other darker and heavier, with many beautiful lamps on the side-tables. The next room was a dining room, with a huge mahogany table and eight chairs upholstered in blue velvet, and the last was a kitchen.

‘Don’t you think this all looks a little too well-preserved?’ Kat said. ‘That table should be falling apart.’

‘It depends how long the house has been abandoned,’ Annie said.

‘About ten years, by the smell of it,’ Renard put in. His hackles had not subsided at all, and there was tension in every step he took. Paz thought to herself that if she was an animal she might look the same. That feeling haunting her had not shifted at all, and every so often she would get further faint snatches of song, a terrible and lonely sound.

‘Upstairs?’ Paz said, knowing the answer and yet half hoping for a different one.

Annie nodded.

They had to climb in single file, the stairs were so narrow. Annie went first, and Paz followed her, then Kat, and lastly Renard, bringing up the rear. It was a good defensive pattern, and it should have kept them safe. Maybe it would have, under other circumstances. But halfway up the stairs the world lurched, and when she looked around, Kat and Renard were nowhere to be seen.

She grabbed Annie’s hand, sheer panic burning through her veins.

‘What happened? Where did they go?’ She did not realise for a moment that she had spoken in Spanish.

Annie must have understood the intent of her question though, because she closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, there was a frustrated line between her eyes.

‘I can’t access the ether,’ she said, glaring in general at the world. ‘I don’t know what’s happening.’

‘If we’re going to find answers,’ Paz said, resigned, ‘they will be upstairs.’

Slowly she and Annie climbed the rest of the steps, which opened out into a wide room. The floor was bare wood, and the walls were painted with lime plaster, which left white dust on Paz’s fingertips when she touched it. There were two long trestle tables against the back wall, piled high with paints, rags and jars of brushes. In the middle of the room was an easel. Standing in the middle of the room was a woman in black, a thin veil draped over her face. She was holding a cat - the cat, surely - in her arms.

She was singing, long and low and so full of grief that Paz felt her eyes well up unbidden. So caught up was she in the music that it took her a moment to realise it was not being sung in a language she knew. She was hearing not the words, but their meaning.

‘ _My grief will never leave me,_

_It is pressed into my heart,_

_Shut up tight inside_

_Like a truck locked up_

_Of which the key is lost_.’

Annie was crying too. Stoic, chilly Annie, who never seemed ruffled by anything, was openly weeping. Paz looked away, feeling that she was not meant to intrude on such a moment.

The woman turned towards them. Her face beneath the veil was pale and skeletal, the skin stretched tight over her bones like the skin on an old mummy.

‘You have come to me,’ she said. ‘Did you hear me crying out over the water, turning the lake to salt with my tears? Have you come to join in my sorrows?’

Paz shook her head.

‘I think there is some mistake,’ she said. ‘I am not grieving.’

‘Are you not?’ the woman said. ‘I can hear the weeping of your heart, child, that longing for a home you fear you will never return to.’

Homesickness washed over Paz, the stirring in her throat she had felt since they set foot in the grounds of her house. It was a passionate and impossible longing, full of the memory of warm sunlight, the taste of bacalao and the scent of rich red wine, the smell of rosemary and garlic. She was almost paralysed by the pain of it.

‘And you,’ the woman said, looking at Annie. ‘You poor child, who wears a mask of steel to hide your heart. The sorrow on you is terrible, that aching for your dead mother and your lost father. Will you not stay with me? I will always understand you. I will help you mourn.’

It was getting hard to think. Paz felt numb, wallowing in memories of her lost childhood in the sun. Then, to her surprise, the cat spoke.

‘I can smell my kittens on you,’ she said. ‘Are they alive?’

Paz blinked.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they are alive, though they need you.’

‘The fairy woman will not let me go,’ the cat said. ‘She is terribly lonely. Everyone and everything that enters this place she traps. She watches them slowly die and she weeps.’

Paz blinked, and then turned to Annie. She was shimmering faintly, and Paz could feel heat rising from her skin. Bracing herself for pain, she plunged her hand into that aura and touched Annie’s shoulder, though it was like touching the surface of a boiling kettle.

‘Annie, the cat says this woman is a fairy. Do you know anything about that?’

She drew her hand back and jammed her finger in her mouth to soothe the pain. Annie looked at her. She was still crying, but the heat was burning the tears from her skin as they fell, thin trails of steam rising from her face.

‘What?’ she said, and it sounded like someone waking up unexpectedly. Paz repeated what the cat had told her.

Annie looked at the woman.

‘You said that you understood us, but we don’t understand you. Who are you?’

‘I am a bean sí,’ the woman said at last. ‘A woman of the mounds. It was my obligation to keen the deaths of the O’Connell family. When Maire O’Connell came over the sea to work and study in the court, I came with her. When she married, I joined her family. When she had children, I knew they would be in my care. When they died too young, I expressed her grief. When she died, I mourned her. But then her husband left the house, and locked it up, and I was forgotten. Long have been the years since his leaving, and no one now remembers me. I have no one to weep for any more.’

The voice of the fairy woman had no power to kill, but it was terrible nonetheless. It sank into their bones, like a creeping chill. Paz and Annie looked at each other, for strength and comfort.

‘It’s true,’ Paz said slowly, ‘that we have felt sorrow in our lives. But we also have people waiting for us. We cannot stay with you.’

Annie reached out and touched Paz’s arm gently. The burning aura around her was gone, and her hand was cool and kind.

‘Let me help you,’ Annie said. ‘I can give you what you truly want.’

‘What I truly want?’ the fairy woman asked.

‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘An ending.’

 

Annie took the fairy woman’s hand, and the world around them wavered. Nothing moved, but all at once Annie and the fairy woman were gone, and Kat and Renard were running up the stairs, calling out her name. The cat, which they had come all this way to find, leapt into her arms, and Paz buried her face in its long soft fur, giving herself a moment to recover.

‘Where is Antimony?’ Renard said. He looked wild with terror.

‘She was here with me. I think she is trying to help the fairy.’

Kat raised an eyebrow, somehow managing to look both sardonic and anxious.

‘A fairy?’

‘Yes,’ Paz said emphatically. ‘She called herself bean sí.’

Renard relaxed, all at once, and shook himself off.

‘I should have guessed,’ he said, sitting down. ‘When you disappeared into the echo. Banshees have a way of getting tangled in memory. Especially ones that lose their family.’ Turning to Kat, he added, ‘Annie will be back soon, once she has taken the fairy woman into the ether.’

True to his word, Annie reappeared only a minute later. Her eyes were dry, and there was no sign that she had been crying.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s done. Shall we take the cat back to her kittens?’

The cat was delighted by the suggestion, and so they began their journey home.

 

They were about halfway back to the lab when Annie stopped, bending down as if to tie her show. Kat and Reynard moved on ahead, but as Paz walked past, Annie reached out and tapped her shoe. Paz felt a jolt of surprise run up her spine, but she said nothing. It was evening now, and the last light was fast fading, the orange sodium street lights just beginning to flicker on. In that odd monochrome landscape it was even harder than usual to guess what Annie was thinking.

‘It never occurred to me how much you might miss Spain,’ Annie said.

Paz shrugged.

‘It’s not so bad. I see my family during the summers, and some day I will go home to them for good. And there is much to love about the Court. I like my work, I like my friends, I like Kat.’

Annie smiled, and then hesitated. The pause was so long that Paz was not sure if they were finished or not. Then at last, Annie spoke again.

‘Still,’ she said. ‘I understand what it’s like to miss something. If you ever want to talk about it, you know where to find me.’

Paz smiled, more touched by the simple offer than she thought she could express.

‘I’ll remember that.’

**Author's Note:**

> The title of the story comes from the Caoineadh Airt Ui’Laoghaire, a famous poem from 18th century Ireland. The version I used was the one translated by Thomas Kinsella, it’s totally worth reading in its own right. The original legend of the Banshee comes from this tradition of keening, or lamenting the dead. The song the Banshee sings in the story is also a traditional lament, translated by Angela Bourke.


End file.
